Astronomers from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration have found strong magnetic fields spiraling around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, named Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). In 2022, the EHT Collaboration released the first image of Sgr A*, revealing that it looked very similar to the much larger black hole at the center of Messier 87 galaxy (M87*). This prompted the team to study Sgr A* in polarized light, which helped them study magnetic fields surrounding the black hole.
Sagittarius A* is located 27,000 light-years from Earth and has a mass about four million times that of the Sun. The Event Horizon Telescope observed the black hole in April 2017. The EHT Collaboration used these observations for both the original image from 2022 and the current study.